Sunday, December 23, 2012

"I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Baked Goods!"

A cartoonist at the dawn of the comic book creates savage
and graphically masterful stories of brutal retribution that are promptly
forgotten. For decades the stories are ignored. 70 years later the stories are
reprinted in deluxe format, become cult hits, and secure an Eisner Award for
the editor. Subsequently, imagery from the stories has popped up as Facebook
avatars, tattoos, proposed scale models, t-shirts worn by celebrities in
movies, and now… but I get ahead of myself.

Fletcher Hanks (www.fletcherhanks.com)
was a golden age comic book artist, creator of mythic figures including
Stardust and Fantomah who some (really smart) people think was the greatest
superhero cartoonist of all time and whom other (really stupid) people assess
as the most inept superhero cartoonist of all time.

A typical Stardust story might involve a simian-like thug
plotting to rid the Earth of its gravity but by page two, Stardust comes along to
stop the guy and spends the next seven pages torturing him in an inventive,
poetically just fashion.If you’ve
been following this blog over the years (?!?), you probably know that I
compiled Hanks’ work into two collections, to which I added material about how
I found the work and the story behind the work.

Of course I made t-shirts to promote the book. And I’ve seen
Hanks’ work appear in different places. Just six months ago, my car battery
went dead in the parking lot behind a suburban hotel where I was attending a
comics convention. When the young cartoonist who gave me a jump, Josh Bayer,
heard my name he rolled down his shirt to show me this:

Another fan preferred Fantomah:

But I think I was even more surprised when I discovered that
Hanks’ drawings now appear on cookies.

Sylvia Toth is the baker at www.goldenagebakery.comlocated in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina. No matter where you live, however,you
can order cookies from Golden Age Bakery featuring your favorite panels from
your favorite golden age (public domain) comics. The Fletcher Hanks cookies
have been the most requested items so far. Ms. Toth says that she has made
hundreds of them.

If you choose, Ms. Toth will bake you up an entire story in
edible form panel by panel (full pages are possible, but too
fragile to ship safely). Particular panels that you find
distasteful may turn out to be delicious!

The cookies are made from all organic, local ingredients
(whenever possible). She has replaced her printer’s ink cartridges with food dye
cartridges, so that after designing a cookie on her computer, she simply sends
the image to her printer—and voila!—sheets of thin, edible paper-thin icing are
covered with accurate reproductions of old comics. Ms. Toth explained to me
that the icing is sweet but bland so as not to mask the delicate flavor of the
cookie itself.

I can attest to the fact that the cookies look really cool, but…

I confessed to Ms. Toth over the phone that I could not
bring myself to eat one. Evidently I am not alone. Ms. Toth said, with a
baker’s sigh, that she hears this a lot. Why is this? Because people like me,
who know enough about vintage comics to want to buy a Hanks cookie, also see
these as collectibles—and therefore, not something you’d want to eat.

This, of course, is crazy thinking. Sooner or later an
organic cookie is going to get green and fuzzy and illegible. Like any ink jet
printing, Ms. Toth explained, in time these panels fade.

With these cookies, each representing a single panel, you
can rearrange the story to your liking. Unkink twists in the plot. Let
evildoers go unpunished.

Does this make his work better—or does it drain the work of
its magical irrational integrity? Using tiles provided by Ms. Toth, I deleted
random panels of a typical Fletcher Hanks story, “The Anti-Gravity Ray,” and
then randomly rearranged them. The plot suddenly resembled that of “Jane Eyre.”

I ate the panels that did not really move me (or the plot).

I rearranged the remaining panels with other cookie panels
from other stories. And ate a few more extraneous frames.

Eat. Rearrange. Eat a few more.

Until, I was finally left with a single cookie…perhaps the
greatest cookie ever baked:

7 comments:

Hey Paul -- doing a story for a local newspaper on Golden Age Bakery. Wanted to get a few comments from you for this -- if you could email me at zack.zacharymsmith@gmail.com ASAP, would be very grateful!